When having to deliver bad news to someone have you ever invoked the disclaimer, “Don’t shoot the messenger?” Identifying the messenger with the message can be hazardous for the message bearer. But in today’s gospel text John the Baptist takes pains to disassociate himself, his status as messenger, from the message he is proclaiming.

He does this, not in order to avoid the crowd’s displeasure, but in order to avoid the people’s elevation of himself to a higher status, to a greater authority, than he inhabits. John’s concern is not that the messenger will be “shot” but that the messenger will be wrongly worshiped.

John’s description of the eschatological judgment to come initially prompted the crowds to ask what they could do to prepare for that time. What kind of “Behavior modification”…